An integrated methodological approach

A mixture of thematic and narrative analyses in Chapter 7 follows the GT analysis of Chapter 6. In this section I examine some of the ways in which these two analytical approaches have been combined in existing research. Since no such research exists within the L2 motivation field I have had to venture further afield to find relevant examples. I also touch on ancillary approaches that provided subtle, rather than formal support for the analysis.Creswell (2007, pp. 78-80) provides a useful chart

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comparing grounded theory and narrative analysis. An adapted version is given in Table 4.1.

ASPECT GT ANALYSIS NARRATIVE INQUIRY

Focus Developing themes or theory to make sense of the nature of participant experience

Exploring participant experience

Type of problem Needing to understand participant experience thematically or conceptually

Needing to tell the stories of participant experience

Unit of analysis Participant experience as a phenomenon as experienced by disparate individuals

Studying one or more individuals

Data analysis Coding data until saturation point Analysing data for stories,

‘restorying’, developing themes, using a chronology

Written analysis Generating a thematic understanding of participant experience perhaps

illustrated diagrammatically

Developing a narrative about the stories of significant events in an individual’s language-learning life

General structure of study

Introduction problem/questions Research procedures Coding Discussion in terms of extant literature

Introduction Research procedures data collection analysis outcomes Reports of stories Individuals theorise about their experience Narrative segments identified Patterns of meaning identified Summary

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It is not the collection stage, but the analysis stage where the differences between thematic and narrative analyses are most marked (Creswell, 2007), but even at this point there may be shared elements. Searching for themes is an element of many, if not all qualitative analyses (Bryman, 2008), and many thematic approaches make careful use of the extracts of narrative accounts. Furlini (2005), for example, combined thematic, narrative, and phenomenological analyses in a study of caregivers of persons with chronic dementia. First she used a categorising approach derived from grounded theory to identify and codify themes across the experiences of the five caregivers. She then re-examined the transcripts, constructing narrative summaries for each participant. These helped “to tease out the

central elements of each caregiver’s dilemma, represent them powerfully and preserve the contextual dimensions” (2005, p. 76). This approach resonates strongly with my own. In a narrative investigation of the historical foundations of personal experience, Candida-Smith (2001) revisited transcripts originally used for a thematic analysis in order to capture recurring symbols or expressive motifs constituting the basic units of narrative flow. Lessard et al. (2008) reversed the order of the preceding studies by conducting the narrative analysis first. Their analysis of transcripts from interviews with 80 high school dropouts led to their identification of three broad ways in which the learners navigated their narrative ‘educational journeys’: setting the stage, teetering, and ending the journey. Subsequent thematic analysis indicated that family turmoil, problems at school, and—of relevance to the current study—a pivotal moment or gradual fade out triggered the end of their educational journeys. Figure 4.1 gives a visual impression of how thematic and narrative analyses complement each other in the current study. A thematic approach, represented by the vertical line, is used to examine aspects of language learning psychology shared by all participants at a certain point in time (for example the category, or theme,

status drive, understood to underlie the learning behaviour of all five participants). A narrative approach, represented by the horizontal line, is used to examine the role played by personal biographical

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in the narrative of the hypothetical learner, second from the top, in the diagram). Together, the two approaches offer disparate but complementary approaches to understanding the language learning. Together, they can show, for example, how learning behaviour can be influenced by both status drive and personal experience, and offer clues as to how status drive, for example, may vary in salience or quality over time (see section 6.3).

Figure 4.1. Visual comparison of narrative and thematic approaches.

Two other approaches, phenomenological analysis and critical incident technique, indirectly influenced the analysis. A phenomenological approach is an attempt to understand rather than conceptualise or interpret data (Creswell, 2007) in order to “enter into the lived experience and perspective of the other person…to see the world with their eyes” (Hawkins, 1988, p. 63). There are aspects of a

phenomenological approach—for example the avoidance, on the part of the researcher, of reliance on existing literature and concepts, and the intent to approach the data with ‘fresh’ eyes—that are key to a judicious exploratory investigation of data or participant experience. What I propose is that my analysis

and discussion should show ‘phenomenological awareness’.

The data collection procedure of critical incident technique (CIT) (see Section 2.4) is in line with the approach adopted in the present study, in that it involves:

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…the investigation of significant occurrences (events, incidents, process or issues), identified by

the respondent, the way they are managed, and the outcomes in terms of perceived effects. The objective is to gain an understanding of the incident from the perspective of the individual, taking into account cognitive, affective and behavioural elements (Chell 2004, p. 48).

However, the analytical procedure of CIT seems a little too prescriptive for the aims of the present study. Chell (2004), for example, claims “The interviewer must be ready for a respondent who will deny that ‘anything has happened’” (p. 46), and suggests ‘ploys’ to get around this. I chose not to adopt this position in my own data collection and analysis. The significant event was originally intended to be the anchor to which the multiple perspectives of the research would be tethered. I subsequently decided to grant this role to the GT analysis and the basic ELMS model that came from it, but it will be shown that significant events do indeed appear to be particularly useful in explaining how motivation functions.

In this section I have provided examples of how it is possible to combine various methods in the analysis of sufficiently rich interview data. It is now time to turn to the mechanism by which these data were collected: the unstructured interview.